- When Vladimir is sick, his mother takes extra-special care of him. She understands him more than most, and is able to calm him.
- After one such childhood sickness, Nabokov remembers waiting for his mother: she's out, and she's going to bring him a present. He imagines her going to a shop where in the display window dangles a novelty-size pencil. Moments later she returns home with this precise present! Totally creepy, or evidence of a deeper connection.
- His mother believes in the significance of these moments.
- "Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life." (2.2.5)